Invecta.5321

God, can you chill out and keep in mind that you are talking about actual human beings? I have so much empathy for the A-Net employees and forum-mods who have to read through all the toxic crap in this forum on a daily basis. I get it, every PvP-Game has its own cringe crybaby community who whine about balance all day. But this forum is something else. Literally 90% of this forum's threads are somehow negative and borderline-toxic. I fully understand why A-Net keeps community interaction to a minimum. I mean, no one is forcing you to play the game. Also, you have been pretty vocal about what bothers you. So i guess you dont belong to the "silent" type of consumers. If you were so unhappy about the game, you would have been long gone. You are just mad about the game not being in a state you'd like it to be in and youre getting irrationally emotional about it.

Depends. I guess its only 2 or 3 people eventually deciding what gets nerfed/buffed/changed. But they probably need class-feedback from multiple A-Net employees playing different types of content. We have Cal Cohen as Balance-Lead and a few people working with him (e.g. DoubleTap). However, i guess A-Net has a rather horizontal and fluid-border development team due to its small size. So there might not be "the" balance team.

People still forget that A-Net is a tiny company. How many of the 400 employees are involved in balancing? Maybe around five to ten? Five to ten people tasked with balancing 9 classes + 3 specs each + weapon mastery over vastly different content (Open-World, High-End PvE, PvP, WvW). And dont forget stuff like armor stats, runes and relics. GW2 has a highly complex and intertwined combat system, which sets the game apart from many other todays MMORPGs (and one of the reasons many people prefer it over its competition). This intertwined combat system is probably the reason why we mostly get numerical balancing, because gameplay-balancing would be an enormous amount of effort for such a small balance-team. I totally get that there are frustrating builds to play against and i also want to smash my keyboard everytime a willbender comes flying through like superman just to oneshot me in a split second before jumping back all the way to Lions Arch (all while having perma aegis and stab). But im afraid to say that the capacities are probably not there in order to have the game in a state some players would want it to be. Also, if you ask 10 players on how the game should be balanced you will get 20 different opinions. I want to point out that A-net is still a company and thus profit-oriented. As a dev you can have the coolest and most creative ideas, but if the developer's or publisher's upper-management is mostly fixated on KPIs then sadly there wont be a space for much new and interesting stuff. I guess that is the reason we got so much half-baked and recycled content in the past (starting with Gyala Delve).

As someone who plays the game on-off for about 10 years now: No, the game isnt more toxic than it used to be. Generally, GW2 is still one of those games with an overall non-toxic community. Toxicity is mostly present in a) high-end min-maxing type of players, since they have certain expectations of players and their performance. However, due to KP-gating you will rarely encounter those unless you are a toxic min-maxer yourself. These are also the same ones crying about balancing non-stop. b) whiny players who feel offended by the slightest thing (which is much more annoying to me). A few days ago in a fractal run i had a player who left the group because she (im assuming its a she due to his/her account-name) saw that the name of my iboga-pet was "Parge Lenis". She went on a full tantrum explaining why that is childish. I just answered back in neutral (but slightly provocative) statements and she left the group. Its just entertaining to me seeing these type of players being a victim to their own emotions. Demographics i guess. You always have to keep in mind that many people who get stuck on mmorpgs are generally not the emotionally-balanced type and use gaming as a form of escapism. Trust me, its been a long search to actually find players who do min-maxing stuff while also being cool human beings who i would want to hang around with irl.

Im suspecting you never set a foot into high-end content. Where the hell does a sword get used there? And where the hell does a sword get used in meta-events? Also i find staff daredevil extremely clunky. Its supposed to be this highly mobile class but ironically most abilities have way too long animations or lock you while executing. My point is, why do i as a thief have to switch class in order to have fun? All other classes have specs or weapon skillsets which feel fun and kind of engaging.

Thief by far has the most boring specs and the weapon-skillsets are mostly useless. Speaking of PvE, the entire base-weapons are just garbage and stuck in 2012. Sword? Useless skillset Shortbow? Useless skillset Pistols? No AoE and undertuned Daggers? Boring and awkward to use Every weapon for the thief feels like having five, weak auto-attacks instead of coherent abilities. And dont get me started out on those mind-numbing "specializations" putting any reasonable player to sleep. Literally every thief's spec boils down to "spam one single button until a condition is met, press another button, then repeat spamming that single button". And to top it off we're going to get such a boring weapon like an MH axe, which will probably end up being a crappier version of the rangers MH axe. I just want a fun power-build with lots of cleaving-potential and big numbers, which could've easily been achieved via greatsword, longbow or hammer. But no, a-net wants thief to be a gimmick class which is constantly outperformed by other classes in terms of utility, aesthetic and FUN.

Can someone give me a build + guide for the quickness untamed? Want to get into it but there are 0 guides out there.